What Web Hosting Costs and What You Get
By CodexierPublished 5 min read
Hosting is the rent your website pays for a server. The monthly price ranges from the cost of a coffee to the cost of a part-time employee, and the marketing on every plan says roughly the same thing. This guide explains the three types of hosting a Swedish business actually chooses between, what the monthly fee includes at each level, and when paying more is the cheaper decision.
What the monthly price includes
Two plans with the same headline price can differ by everything that matters. Read the plan page for these items before comparing numbers; if an item is missing from the page, assume it is not included.
- Storage and bandwidth limits, and what happens when you exceed them: throttling, extra charges or suspension.
- Whether an SSL certificate is included and renews automatically. Today it should be free and automatic; a plan that charges for it is dated.
- Email hosting. Many plans bundle mailboxes, but business email is usually better on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 anyway.
- A staging environment, so changes can be tested before they go live.
- A content delivery network, which serves images from a location near the visitor and is the cheapest speed gain available.
- Renewal price. Introductory prices for the first year are common; the second-year price is the real cost.
When we launch a site through our business website package we set it up on managed hosting sized to the site, and the running cost is separated from the build cost so you can see both. Our website cost guide explains how build and running costs relate.
Backups, support and uptime promises
These three items are where the price difference between plans actually goes, and where a cheap plan costs the most when something breaks.
Backups
Ask how often, how long they are kept, whether they are stored elsewhere, and whether you can restore them yourself. A daily backup kept for thirty days that you can restore from the control panel is the baseline for a business site.
Support
Ask for the channels and hours, and whether support covers your site or only the server. Managed hosts generally help with the site; shared hosts generally do not.
Uptime promise
An uptime figure in a contract is only meaningful with a remedy attached, usually a credit. Without one it is a marketing sentence. Monitoring your own uptime is cheap and worth doing regardless.
Swedish and EU data location
Where the server is located affects two things: speed for Swedish visitors, and how much GDPR paperwork you need. A server in Stockholm, Helsinki or Frankfurt is fast for Swedish users and keeps personal data inside the EU, which simplifies your processor agreement. A US-based host is not forbidden, but it means relying on transfer mechanisms and a longer answer in your privacy policy.
- Ask the host where the data centre is, not just where the company is registered.
- Check that a data processing agreement is available and where it says data is stored and backed up.
- If your site collects health data, membership data or anything sensitive, treat EU location as a requirement rather than a preference.
- A content delivery network can serve cached pages from anywhere; that is fine for public pages and worth checking for logged-in areas.
When to pay more
The decision rule is simple: pay for hosting in proportion to what an hour of downtime or a lost day of content costs you. A brochure site for a consultancy that gets its work through referrals can live on a cheap managed plan. A shop that takes orders around the clock, a booking site for a clinic, or any site where the phone stops ringing when the site goes down should be on a managed or cloud plan with real support and tested backups.
When you do not need to pay more: if your site is static, rarely changes and would be embarrassing rather than expensive to lose for a day, the cheapest reputable managed plan is enough, and we will tell you so instead of upselling a maintenance package. If you are unsure which category your site is in, book a free 15-minute call and we will look at your current plan together.
Frequently asked questions
Is the cheapest hosting plan ever the right choice for a business?
Yes, for a small brochure site with low traffic where a day of downtime costs little. The condition is that backups exist and can be restored, and that somebody is watching whether the site is up. Without those two, the cheap plan is a gamble rather than a saving.
Should hosting be in the agency's name or ours?
Yours. The account, the domain and the billing should belong to your company, with the agency given access. That way you can change agency without moving the site, and nothing expires because an invoice went to someone who left.
Does hosting in Sweden make the site faster?
For Swedish visitors, a server in Sweden or a nearby EU country reduces the delay on every request. The larger speed gains usually come from image sizes and a content delivery network, so location helps but is not the whole story.
What is the difference between hosting and a maintenance plan?
Hosting keeps the server running. A maintenance plan keeps the site running: updates, security checks, restore tests, small fixes and someone to call. Managed hosting overlaps a little with maintenance but does not replace it for a site built on a CMS.
Not sure what your hosting actually includes?
Send us the name of your plan and we will tell you in fifteen minutes whether it fits your site, what is missing and whether you are overpaying.
Book a free 15-minute call